I’m going to level with you: We’ve made some mistakes on Twitter. Everyone has. You have.
But there’s good news:
We as human beings, and as businesses, tend to learn from our mistakes. In today’s Two-Minute Marketing blurb, we’re going to run through three mistakes we see brands making over and over again.
That way, you’ll never have to look at one of these “what not to do on social media” posts again and groan internally as you realize you’ve, well, done those things on social media.
#1) Don’t be a flock follower.
Unfortunately, bad advice is in abundance when it comes to social media practices for business. Sometimes, it’s not so much that the advice is bad, but that it might just be less relevant and effective as social platforms have crowded and evolved.
Both are true of the “flock following” method of using twitter. This is when guides recommend following X amount of people per day in order to get follows back.
The result is often an account with 40,000 followers (yayyy!), but who also follows 45,000 people themselves (booo!) and has a largely un-targeted, disengaged audience.
Creating real relationships and being selective in your networking so that 1,000 people follow you out of genuine interest is more valuable to your business than being followed by 50,000 accounts who just post memes all day. Unless you’re in the meme business, then you might just be onto something.
#2) Limit self-serving links.
Links are not inherently bad on twitter, in fact they can often be used to cultivate followings who love what you have to share.
That said, people who only link to their own promotions are missing the point of twitter: People follow and interact with accounts that curate and broadcast content that is genuinely helpful, humorous, or interesting to them.
If you are going to be tweeting about your own products or a promotion you’re running, then you’d better have 5-10 pieces of killer interesting content in between your self-serving tweets.
Best practices on twitter, as with all social media, are to always be giving more than you’re asking. If you think about the accounts you follow, don’t you think you’d drop them like a heavy, dirty simile if all they did was tweet “50% off reindeer antlers for your car, buy now!”?
Have you already made these twitter mistakes? Sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done.
#3) Don’t be the awkward, quiet kid.
Twitter is all about balance, so just as you don’t want to shout about your own products all the time, you also don’t want to not garner attention.
Every twitter session you should be…
- Tweeting useful content
- Jumping into relevant industry discussions and mentioning influencers
- Responding politely and quickly to any inquiries directed specifically at you through DMs or mentions.
- Interaction drives curiosity, and curiosity gets people to pay attention to what the heck you’re doing with your twitter, and by extension your business.
Chirp chirp chirp!
That’s the sound of today’s two minutes being up. We hope you learned something, and we’ll see you tomorrow.
The Responster Team
(by the way, you can totally follow us on twitter at @ResponsterHQ)